proscenium

{ an odyssey in 13 short stanzas } sat to the side, the boy looked to the stage nearby, at his life. as if from a vast distance, and across the prelapsarian chasm of time. and what he saw both numbed and enchanted him. there were lights: shafts, cones, ziggurats, whimsies, dust devils of them dancing flittingly about on the floor, insouciant and knowing, glancing knowingly at the boy from time to time as if alive. as alive as he was, tendering a kind of wisdom long ago lost to the winds, the riverine eddies, the rills, the secret pronouncements of nature, the hushed whispering at the escarpment of things. but who was whispering what? knelt to the side, the young man grimaced, as if realizing something for the first time except it felt so old, so arcane, so weathered into the smoothness of a stone sent bankward by the river’s inscrutable flow, set there at least for a time. well, he thought, this is what one does. one runs. one takes up the arms of righteousness. one objects to what is…